“We shan’t be long,” said Calamy. “The time to drink a glass of wine, that’s all. I’m not a bit tired, you know. And Cardan’s suggestion of Chianti is very tempting.”
“Ah well,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle, “if you prefer a glass of wine….” She turned away with a sad indignation and rustled off towards the door, sweeping the tiled floor with the train of her velvet dress. Mr. Falx and Miss Thriplow, who had been lingering impatiently near the door, drew back in order that she might make her exit in full majesty. With a face that looked very gravely out of the little window in her bell of copper hair, Irene followed. The door closed behind them.
Calamy turned to Mr. Cardan. “If I prefer a glass of wine?” he repeated on a note of interrogation. “But prefer it to what? She made it sound as if I had had to make a momentous and eternal choice between her and a pint of Chianti—and had chosen the Chianti. It passes my understanding.”
“Ah, but then you don’t know Lilian as well as I do,” said Mr. Cardan. “And now, let’s go and hunt out that flask and some glasses in the dining-room.”
Half-way up the stairs—they were a grand and solemn flight sloping gradually upwards under a slanting tunnel of barrel vaulting—Mrs. Aldwinkle paused. “I always think of them,” she said ecstatically, “going up, coming down. Such a spectacle!”
“Who?” asked Mr. Falx.
“Those grand old people.”
“Oh, the tyrants.”
Mrs. Aldwinkle smiled pityingly. “And the poets, the scholars, the philosophers, the painters, the musicians, the beautiful women. You forget those, Mr. Falx.” She raised her hand, as though summoning their spirits from the abyss. Psychical eyes might have seen a jewelled prince with a nose like an ant-eater’s slowly descending between obsequious human hedges. Behind him a company of buffoons and little hunch-backed dwarfs, stepping cautiously, sidelong, from stair to stair.…
“I forget nothing,” said Mr. Falx. “But I think tyrants are too high a price to pay.”